EDAPT = Email-Data Assistant & Processor Tool:
A data handler for business sales email -- a web-app for database ingestion via
email and data viewing & downloading via website.
Demo:
EDAPT @ datalux
The Problem:
If you have regularly-generated data-containing email messages that you'd like
to have automatically processed so that you can easily query the data and
download it in a form that's convenient for displaying in a spreadsheet, then
you need a tool like EDAPT.
The Solution:
EDAPT continually retrieves data from regularly-generated data-containing email
messages (via Gmail), parses the email messages to extract the data, ingests
that data into a (MySQL) database, allows queries by website graphical user
interface (GUI), and allows downloading the contents of the database in the
form of a CSV (comma-separated-values) file.
Example:
EDAPT is particularly useful for people operating an automated self-serve
business (such as a car wash) that has auto-generated (sales report) data sent
by email on a daily basis.
You can run EDAPT in a demo form (without incoming email, using static demo data) on your own personal computer, viewing and interacting with it in a web browser.
To run EDAPT fully as a web-app on the internet, you will need:
- a computer with continual connection to the internet to act as a server, to host and serve the web-app to the internet -- if you don't have one on-hand, a small amount of money can get you easy access to such a computer with a web-hosting company;
- permissions (that is, sudo user access and maybe root user access) to set up that server appropriately and in a secure way; and
- regularly incoming data-containing email messages that can be directed or forwarded to a Gmail email account (although you can go without this part if you just want to set up a demo version with some static data).
When running EDAPT privately, not online, but on your own computer, the needs for server set-up and security are drastically reduced.
Note that if you want to run EDAPT fully with incoming email, and if your email messages' formatting and content do not match that of the default in this app, then the code that parses the email messages will have to be re-written to properly extract the data from your email messages. You may also want to tweak the timing of the email retrieval. (The default is to retrieve once a day at 4am.)
In any scenario, you can use your own machine (for example, a personal desktop or laptop computer) and/or a remote machine (for example, a GNU/Linux server provided by a cloud-service or web hosting company). It may be easiest to do the initial setup, any necessary trouble-shooting, and perhaps some development on your own computer when possible, and copy/push the final or production code to a remote machine dedicated to hosting the web-app.
There are three major phases of installation and set-up. Visit each link for detailed instructions.
- Initial Set-Up
install in demo form (probably on a local personal computer) - Email Set-Up
set up for email retrieval (probably on a local personal computer) - Hosting Set-Up
set up for hosting online (probably on a remote server computer, either hosting at a bare IP address or hosting with a domain like www.example.com)
If hosting a demo form of EDAPT, you can skip phase 2.
- Technologies Involved
- Structure of App
- Useful Commands for installers and developers
- Developer Notes